ideas both polymorphic and beneficial

You wouldn’t try to get up on that fitness peak by yourself, would you?

People ask me why I work on frogs, snails, andstrawberries. Do I just like French cuisine? No. I’m interested in, you guessed it, adaptive diversity. And in that regard, there are common themes across these seemingly unrelated projects. Here’s one of the main ones.

Venezuela is bleeding. Grocery stores have no food. Drug stores have no medicine. Protesters and soldiers are clashing, often fatally. Dissidents are in jail. Folks wait in line for hours to buy bread. Neighborhood groups have to physically stand guard night and day over staples like rice and powdered milk in order to thwart looters.

So what, you may ask. Poor people are poor, what else is new? I may take issue with your fatalistic attitude, but that’s a topic for another day. Even cynics should care about this, for two reasons. First, it’s happening because of an autocratic populist nationalist government, something that has recently become very relevant to those of us in the United States. Second, you’re wrong about these people being poor. These are would-be middle class professionals who went to private high school. And I know, because I was there in school with them.

I recently watched Louis C.K.’s latest standup routine on Netflix. One of his bits is that even though all religions are “equal,” he tells his kids that “the Christians won.” His proof: What year is it?

This got me thinking. The Gregorian Calendar does implicitly uphold the birth of Jesus as the Most Important Event Ever. Maybe that’s fine, because all timekeeping systems are invariably arbitrary. And changing the one we’ve got would be a phenomenal inconvenience. But what if we’d rather emphasize values that aren’t uniquely Christian? Science. Reason. Egalitarianism. The kinds of things people are marching in the streets about. Could we do better? Ideally, what would a secular, globally acceptable calendar look like?

When I was about ten, I got a Far Side page-a-day calendar for Christmas. Of course I couldn’t wait a whole year to read the cartoons, so I sat down and flipped through the entire thing. I adored the gags, but I couldn’t understand many of them. My poor parents had to set a rule that they would explain only one joke per month, to minimize my pestering them with questions. That left me to research the others on my own, plunging me into books on prehistory, microbiology, and ecology.

So I learned a lot from Gary Larson. Inspired, I copied his style in my own attempts at humorous line drawing. As the child of two schoolteachers in rural Alaska, I spent a lot of time in classrooms both before and after the other students had to be there, which gave me plenty of access to barren blackboards. Day after day I illustrated scientific puns with chalk. I like cartooning, but my freehand skills are limited. I will never create gorgeous scientific sketches on par with Bird and Moon, American Beetles, or Stated Clearly. Still, I’ve always loved using simple whimsical pictures to share truths about nature.

Nature, it has been said, is red in tooth and claw. An endless struggle. When two species go at it for long enough, they even begin to adapt to each other. Each new weapon prompts a new counter-weapon in your enemy. This constant escalation, as illustrated in this Futurama gif, is called a coevolutionary arms race. The term originated back when the USA and the USSR were busy building missiles and anti-missiles, and it was easily to see evolution in the same light. But it’s still just a metaphor, and perhaps not the best one. After all, the goal of a nuclear arms race is Mutual Assured Destruction: peace because the consequences of war would be unthinkable to either side. An analogous situation might exist in a face-off between two heavily-armored members of the same species, but interspecies interactions are rarely so symmetrical. They are less like The Butter Battle Book and more like Green Eggs and Ham: a persistent and dynamic chase. That matters, because sometimes one of the species is us. Humans often seek to control nature: to kill germs, to eliminate weeds and pests, to stop vectors from spreading disease. If we’re going to get our teeth and claws bloody, we should at least know what kind of fight we’re joining.

I’m encountering a lot of anxiety about Russia these days. Maybe it’s because our recent election turned out to be triumph of Kremlin meddling. Or it might be that the insecure man-child they helped install is now threatening to revive the nuclear arms race. Could Russia end up digging its fingers further into American soil? I’m no geopolitical analyst, and I don’t know. Certainly there is precedent. Russia has done so before, for longer than these fifty states have existed as a nation. Of course I’m talking about Alaska. And I do know something about that. I can’t predict or explain the actions of a foreign government, or even our own. But maybe we can all learn to get along anyway.

Throughout my entire childhood, I spent part of each year in the former Russian Empire. My otherwise-Midwestern parents were schoolteachers in several tiny villages on the Kodiak Archipelago. I attended two years of high school in Ouzinkie, population 221, a Native Alaskan community on Spruce Island. The island is lush and evergreen, covered with spruce and alder, teeming with salmon and eagles, and free from the famous bears of the larger islands. Everything comes in by bush plane via a rocky airstrip. The majority of vehicles on the gravel streets are ATVs, along with a handful of trucks. Folks enjoy fishing, hunting, boating, basketball, and, at least in those days before Netflix, plenty of satellite TV.